With no treaty in effect, nations could resume testing nukes at any time. This would cause a major arms race. The risk of nuclear terrorism or accidental launch make nuclear disarmament a very crucial goal for all nations. Japan wants to work with the United States on ending nuclear testing and building a world with no nukes.

President Obama would make the world a much safer place if he took U.S. land-based nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert. He has called the policy a "dangerous relic of the Cold War," and a number of high-ranking military officers and government officials agree. So why hasn't Obama done anything about it?

The truth is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe. The human and environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons -- whether by testing, mistake or malice -- is the very reason we need to eliminate them altogether.

There's no debating we would all be better off if there were less and better-guarded highly enriched uranium and plutonium. But the summit missed an essential point: "Nuclear security" is an absurd proposition in a world bristling with more than 17,000 nuclear weapons.

Generations from now, the world will look back and recall that the greatest advances in the human condition were driven by young people's refusal to heed the voices that insisted the world cannot change. They will say the same of nuclear weapons.

All the money spent by the Sheldon Adelsons of the world, to sink this nomination, is a colossal waste. Chuck Hagel will be confirmed, and neoconservative influence over our military policy will finally, and thankfully, be dead.

The United States is about to buy a nuclear bomb that costs 1.5 times its weight in solid gold. It would make even King Midas blush. Isn't it time for the Pentagon to get rid of its golden curse, before it starves our military of the resources they truly need?

Sister Anne Montgomery is one of the Bangor 5, who broke into a nuclear base near Seattle as a symbolic wakeup call to the world which, they believe, is sleepwalking toward nuclear annihilation with the United States leading the way.

Rather than retreating from the precipice of an avoidable disaster, almost all of the nine nuclear weapons countries are upgrading their nuclear arms, at an estimated total cost of one trillion dollars over the next decade.